Jungle Is Hard? (3)
After buying his items, Yeongho stepped into his own jungle and stood perfectly still, sinking into a state of total concentration.
This was an active use of Battle Sense, gathering all his awareness to a single point and narrowing the detection net instead of widening it, stretching its range out farther in return.
Looks like this opponent starts in the upper jungle.
Thanks to that, he could read everything about the enemy jungler’s route even across several hundred meters of terrain.
He seemed to head downward, then planted a ward around the camp before moving up toward higher ground.
Yeongho’s Sashak dashed off toward the target with a bouncy, almost jaunty stride.
They’d even set wards to prevent invades, and the top and mid laners kept circling nearby to light up the fog of war as much as they could.
And yet there was no one who could stop Yeongho from reading their positions from outside vision and walking straight in.
As naturally as water flowing downhill, Sashak infiltrated the enemy side and crouched in a bush, watching the enemy jungler.
The champion was Cave, a double-barrel shotgun-wielding outlaw straight out of the Wild West.
“Mm... I’ve got some pretty bad feelings about shotguns, I’ll say that much.”
His face was smiling, but his eyes had gone sharp.
Viewers, already predicting another round of merciless bullying, flooded the chat until it practically caught fire.
While the back-and-forth flew by in chat, monsters spawned in the camp and Cave began hunting them down.
Boom! Boom!
Cave was a champion whose attack pattern required him to reload after firing two shots.
On paper, that looked like a drawback, but each shot hit incredibly hard, and although the spread was narrow, his basic attacks were area attacks, which was a huge advantage.
Because of that, he cleared camps quickly, making him a favorite pick for junglers, and his excellent skirmishing ability kept him near the top of every tier list.
But no matter how strong a champion might be, there was always no answer for a surprise attack no one saw coming.
Boom! Thunk. Boom! Thunk.
“...Huh!?”
As Cave was busily unloading rounds into the red buff, the sound of a dagger plunging in cut through the shots.
He realized the ambush a beat too late and kicked off the ground to make distance, but by then his life had already been shaved down quite a bit.
“Damn it! Where’d he come from!?”
Sensing that retreating now would completely ruin his jungle clear, Cave chose not to abandon the camp and run.
Instead, he decided to finish the hunt and force the fight.
Boom! Boom!
He kept firing into the red buff, dropping its health until it reached the proper threshold, then used his Smite.
He’d get level 2 first and turn to fight, figuring even a messy opening could still be salvaged into a favorable skirmish.
But.
“Ack!?”
The one who hit level 2 first wasn’t Cave.
It was Sashak.
Yeongho, whose reaction speed let him slip into openings even against pro-level opponents, wasn’t going to lose a Smite fight like this.
In the end, Cave took more damage, fled, and died with a hole blown through the back of his head.
Hell opened up in front of the enemy jungler’s path.
Yeongho would take one camp, hide, chase and kill; then clear another camp and go kill again.
Before long, Cave was already dead three times, and he screamed in despair, begging his teammates to help him, please, just help him.
The top and mid laners couldn’t stand it anymore, so they swallowed their lane losses and kept moving through the jungle to pressure Sashak.
If things went on like this, the game would really become a 4v5 because of a brutal jungle gap, so even if it was irritating, there was no choice but to do whatever it took to claw back the advantage.
Of course, even then, not much changed.
In a camp made up of one large-billed toucan and five small-billed toucans, Yeongho had cleared the monsters away and left just one small-billed toucan standing.
He scratched his head and answered the viewers’ chat.
“The basis? I’m just moving by instinct. I can kind of see where the other guy’s going to show up.”
He wasn’t lying.
He really was doing everything with instinct alone, and he could see exactly how the enemy was moving.
The only catch was that his instinct was absurdly sensitive, so overwhelming it was hard to believe it shouldn’t be classified as a superpower.
The viewers, who had no way of knowing the full story, were showering him with endless praise, saying that Yeongho seemed to possess both the mechanics and the game sense that esports players always talked about.
“Ah, here they come.”
Yeongho, who had been crouched in a bush while watching chat and chatting back, sensed someone approaching and went into stealth with his Surprise Show! skill.
Cave, who had found the lone remaining small-billed toucan, rushed over as if he’d just spotted food after days of starving.
Boom! Crash! Boom!
Even using Overcharged Ammunition, a skill that caused explosions within a set radius, Cave was doing everything he could just to pick up a single small-billed toucan.
But even after all that, no experience came his way.
That was because the hidden Sashak had entered at the exact right moment and landed the last hit.
“Heh, heheheh...”
Cave, now utterly ashen, let out a hollow laugh and hung his head, pointing his gun at the ground.
He looked as if he’d lost even the will to resist.
He did look pitiful, but Yeongho had decided to give it his all anyway.
So he stabbed him in the back as fast as he possibly could, sending him off to a safe(?) place of resurrection.
When Cave respawned later, he didn’t go near his jungle anymore.
Instead, he marched straight down mid and started eating the lane by sweeping the minion wave with Overcharged Ammunition.
“Hey, what are you doing!”
“Hahahaha! Let’s all eat and survive together!”
“You lunatic! Get lost already!?”
“I’m taking mid~ you go back to the jungle~”
The enemy team had fractured from within.
In the end, another instant surrender came out, and the game ended quickly.
“Ah! I’ve heard that when the jungler goes to lane and steals minions like that, it’s bad manners too. I’m seeing a lot of bad friends today.”
Saying that, Yeongho opened the match history and hit the report button.
If you take your frustration out on the wrong teammate and drag them down just because the game isn’t going your way, there should absolutely be consequences.
It seemed like he’d led the game well again, but the viewers’ reactions were strangely lukewarm.
They were praising him, sure, but not with the kind of heartfelt excitement you’d expect.
Hmm. I wanted proper praise, but maybe I’m the sort of guy people call an attention whore?
Taking that as a challenge, he played several more games of Sashak jungle afterward.
Not every match turned out exactly like the ones before.
The opening strategy of suppressing the enemy jungler’s growth through his detection ability—something that might as well have been called Absolute Vision—was always effective.
But he didn’t always end up in a pure one-on-one situation.
When they judged that his own jungle was falling too far behind and becoming dangerous, the laners sometimes came to help.
Especially since not all of Yeongho’s viewers were great at games, there were even enemy laners who absolutely crushed their lane and then still cooperated as much as possible with their jungler.
“Kill Sashak!”
“He’s out of stealth! Behind—damn it! Boxes!”
“Huh? That’s a clone! Aaaah!”
Still, the result didn’t change much.
Just as it had when Yeongho played lane, it didn’t matter if top came to help or mid came too.
He just handled two of them, or three of them, together.
Sashak’s ultimate, Twin Show!, created a clone identical in appearance to the champion.
The clone was a little weaker than the original champion, but it could still attack enemies, and when its life ran out it scattered several activated trap boxes around it before disappearing.
Using that, he could trick enemies or create moments where he could cram in a burst of damage all at once.
That’s an insanely good skill, isn’t it? Is the balance really supposed to be like this?
To Yeongho, Sashak’s ultimate looked even stronger than the ultimates of other champions.
But there was a reason for that.
There were plenty of players who struggled just to fully control a single champion of their own, so smoothly controlling a clone as well was naturally a long shot.
Sashak’s clone required him to use every finger joint on both hands, like manipulating a puppet with invisible strings tied to his fingertips.
It was the kind of control scheme that was extremely hard to master unless you practiced it obsessively.
So while there was basic AI assistance built in, people who could bring out 100 percent of the clone’s performance were, in truth, nearly impossible to find even in the highest tiers.
If all you were doing was hiding somewhere and steering a single clone, maybe you could manage.
But how many people could focus on the minute control of each finger joint while they were in the middle of a dagger fight with an enemy?
Most people could only manage basic directional commands, at best.
That was why Sashak’s clone had been balanced to a level that bordered on overpowered compared to other champions’ ultimates.
No matter how I look at it, that’s a broken skill.
And yet Yeongho could do it.
His instincts were absurdly beyond everyone else’s, and he could fully control his own body as well.
So bringing the clone’s performance out to its maximum felt easy.
Once he naturally reached level 6 on Sashak, even fighting two-on-one or three-on-one wasn’t difficult.
He’d already been a champion built for guerrilla warfare, running around and harassing people from every angle.
Put in Yeongho’s hands, and with his peak-level champion value on full display, he became so vicious that even if the entire enemy team piled on him, it looked like he was merely playing with them.
After running several games with Sashak alone, it was starting to get close to time to end the stream.
Maybe that was why the quick-witted viewers began sending donations.
There weren’t any whales among them, but the proportion of viewers donating was much higher than usual.
The only thing was that the messages were all bizarre.
“Ah...”
Usually, when he played well, people were happy to praise him and enjoy the show.
But this was the first time anyone had ever told him to stop because he was too good, and Yeongho stared blankly at the donation messages as they kept piling up.
Even while that was happening, there were so many viewers donating with the same kind of message that, even though each one was a small amount, the total pile of coins was larger than usual.
From Yeongho’s point of view, it was a hilarious little incident he couldn’t quite laugh at.